CERN, Switzerland -- The first beam in the Large Hadron
Collider at CERN1 was successfully steered around the full
27 kilometres of the world’s largest and most powerful
particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning, setting the world record for the Biggest scientific project.

Photo: The Large Hadron Collider - a
$9 billion particle accelerator designed to simulate conditions
of the Big Bang that created the physical Universe - was switched
on at 0732 GMT.(enlarge
photo)

The startup has been eagerly awaited by 9,000
physicists around the world who will conduct experiments here.

“The LHC is a discovery machine,” said CERN Director
General Robert Aymar, “its research programme has the potential
to change our view of the Universe profoundly, continuing
a tradition of human curiosity that’s as old as mankind itself.”

Scientists applauded as one of the most
ambitious experiments ever conceived got successfully underway,
with protons being fired around a 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel
deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland in an attempt
to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Particle physicist Dr Brian Cox, from the University
of Manchester, who will be working on Atlas - one of the two
largest detectors - said: “The Large Hadron Collider it is
the most complex machine ever built, and it's going
to take us to a place we've never been before."

In the coming months, the collider is expected
to begin smashing particles into each other by sending two
beams of protons around the tunnel in opposite directions.

Nostradamus 9 44: "All should leave Geneva. Saturn turns
from Gold to iron, The contrary positive ray (RAYPOZ) will
exterminate evrything, there will be signs in the sky before
this."

Bible, Revelation 6:14 "And the heaven departed as a
scroll when it is rolled toghether; and every mountain and
island were moved out of their places."

Others have branded it a colossal waste of cash,
draining resources from its multinational collaborators that
could have been spent on scientific research with more tangible
benefits to mankind.

The collider will operate at higher energies and
intensities in the next year, potentially generating enough
data to make a discovery by 2009, experts say.

They say the experiment has the potential to confirm
theories that physicists have been working on for decades
including the possible existence of extra dimensions.

They also hope to find a theoretical particle
called the Higgs boson -- sometimes referred to as the "God
particle," which has never been detected, but would help explain
why matter has mass.

The collider will recreate the conditions
of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when
there was a hot "soup" of tiny particles called quarks and
gluons, to look at how the universe evolved, said John Harris,
U.S. coordinator for ALICE, a huge detector specialized to
analyze that question.

Fears have emerged that the collider could
produce black holes that could suck up anything around them
-- including the whole Earth. Such fears prompted legal actions
in the U.S. and Europe to halt the operation of the Large
Hadron Collider, alleging safety concerns regarding black
holes and other phenomena that could theoretically emerge.

Although physicists acknowledge that the
collider could, in theory, create small black holes, they
say they do not pose any risk.

A study released Friday by CERN
scientists explains that any black hole created would be tiny,
and would not have enough energy to stick around very long
before dissolving. Five collider collaborators who did not
pen the report independently told CNN there would be no danger
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